Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 3

This Stuff Is Everywhere

If you want to get a better understanding of how widespread this simple problem is, you only have to look at points of conflict around the globe. When people are insisting on preservation of their culture, there is always much defiance against what is considered 'civilised'. Sometimes we don't say it out loud, but whenever you hear of somebody complaining about other people's cultural practices being 'barbaric', you can be fairly certain that what that person is pushing is civilisation as a universal value. 

Don't get me wrong - I like civilisation. Yet I can see how that falls on deaf ears to those who are wedded to their culture. It's do-or-die time when civilisation comes knocking and tells you to surrender your cultural practices. If your thing is bagging a bunch of baby seals and clubbing them or keeping mink in cages and then skinning them for fur coats, the civilised world is going to come at you hard. And you will be saying ""but this practice is deep and old in my culture. All the same, civilisation won't have a bar of it. 

So, don't get me wrong, I do have sympathy for the cultural practices of the peoples of this planet - but I do draw the line at marching with Nazi flags or Confederate flags and retrograde monsters trying to sneak through racism and anti-semitism as something acceptable. If you can't tell you're on the side of assholes-in-history and act accordingly, then you don't get much sympathy from me. 

The reality is everybody picks and chooses their moment to side with civilisation and then culture. People act according to their interests in a very Machiavellian way. It's the kind of sad wisdom that comes from having seen too much. A young person ought to get used to that and learn not to judge too harshly. 

On Why Whaling Is A Terrible Battleground

Here's an example of the defiant cultural shibboleth that just won't die. 

There used to be a lot of countries that used to do commercial whaling. Then, in the 1980s, there was a sea change of public opinion about whether people really should be doing this stuff any more. The process of civilisation had arrived to a rather brutal 19th century kind of industry. The International Whaling Commission which used to decide which countries were allowed to catch how many tonnes of whale, suddenly grew this higher consciousness and decided that all commercial whaling should be banned. And so commercial whaling came to an official end. 

As we know there are a number of holdout nations - Japan, Norway, Iceland, and Russia.  Of the 4 countries, Japan was perhaps the most vocal about its desire to re-commence commercial whaling. At the core of its defiant attitude towards the prevailing winds of banning all commercial whaling was a belief that whaling is a cultural practice in Japan. When we pick a little bit at Norway and Iceland's commitment towards whale hunting, you hit a similar kind of bedrock belief that catching whale for food was, and should remain a part of their lives. If you talk to them, they don't see why you living in some country that has anything and everything in your supermarkets, gets to tell them what they can and cannot eat. 

As I pointed out in the previous entry, the cultural argument is implicitly bolstered with defiance precisely because that's how culture works - by being defiant. Over the years, the Anglophone nations have spent considerable rhetorical energy in a bid to stop Japan (and to a lesser extent Norway and Iceland) from their commercial whaling. Most of the time, those attempts fell on deaf ears, and it only resulted in ever more occasions for the Japanese whaling fleet to go sailing the open seas. 

Even the ICJ case which deemed the scientific whaling was actually commercial whaling in disguise resulted in Japan withdrawing from the IWC. Japan declared her whaling fleet would not go whaling in the Southern Oceans near the antarctic. Instead the fleet would whale within Japan's territorial waters. The point is, they're not going to stop because in their paradigm, it is in their culture to go whaling, and we know this by the very ferocity of the defiance. Maybe the gentle hand of civilisation will come to the Japanese eventually, but right now, the world has spent 40 years making it a matter of culture. It didn't set out to do so, but that's kind of where it has ended up. 

Why The Cultural Argument Isn't Always Great

This leads me to the next point. Mounting a defence over an action or practice based on culture is actually widespread. The "we do 'X' because it is our custom to do so" has tremendous sway all over the globe. If the cultural practice argument comes from an indigenous person, we the civilised colonisers are inclined to back right off from whatever is triggering their defiance. Most of the time, we play it cool and try not to invoke the defiance of the cultural defenders. It's the polite thing to do, it's the right thing to do. 

I have a friend Roddy who is half Samoan and he once said to me "mate, the cultural argument is not so good, eh? Like Samoans used to eat people as their culture. You can't really be saying to other people that it's okay to eat people because it's part of your culture. Some things are just wrong. Eating people is wrong".

Like I said before, the process of being Civilised demands we draw some firm lines somewhere. 

On Why Civilisation Can Be Bad Too

As Australia Day/Invasion Day rolled around again this year, and the debates get more strident every year. On the one side is the default/conservative position that the arrival of the white colonisers is worthy of celebration. Set against that is the indigenous voice that says it was a horrible invasion, an undeclared, unwarranted act of war followed by genocide. As history goes, so goes the narrative, and with the narrative go all the judgments so in many ways the rancour has to do with the representation of historic events. 

If you're not white like me, and therefore not of the demographic that claims kinship with the first fleet colonists, it's a little more abstract. Historically speaking, we don't get to come to Australia without the events of 1788 onwards. The problem with Australia is that the civilisation that came hand in hand with colonialism totally washed over the continent like a tidal wave. It did a lot of damage and washed away lives. There is nothing but the defiance of indigenous people to offer up resistance to this civilisation. 

The civilisation that has covered itself all over Australia is at once optimistic and exploitative. Whether it is Macarthur and his flock of merinos, or the gold rush, or the deep mines we have cut into the land, the process of civilisation as has transpired in Australia is brutally efficient at exploitation of natural resources and brooks no dissent; all of this was/is in exchange for ever more material wealth. Yet we find so much hope in the material wealth we can exploit from this land. This process is so much so, the best way to understand the Australian economy is as a quarry, shearing shed, and abattoir. 

Culture does not really come into Australian life much. I think it might be a land of philistines. Sydney is never going to be like New York. Melbourne is never going to be like London. Brisbane is always going to be a provincial, parochial, country town. As for the other capital cities of Australia, the less said the better. Australia is the land where Toynbee's Civilisation has smashed David Graeber's Culture. In Australia, culture lost, still loses everyday, and will keep losing out to the process of civilisation - getting beaten up, pretty much like a punching bag. 

And it is against this monolithic wonder that is modern civilisation with no real concern for culture, that the Indigenous people are defiantly raising their flag. If you don't have some sympathy for that, you have no heart, and most likely you are one of the many philistines. For the record, that is not a good thing. 

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 2

Why Civilisation? Why Culture? (What to Make of 70 Million Votes for Trump)

David Graeber had a few more interesting thing to say about this discussion about culture. The concept of Civilisation came from French academics. The notion of Culture was floated by the Germans pretty much in defiance of the French notion of Civilisation. These abstractions are merely extensions of an articulated value statement according to Graeber. Civilisation is a sociologist's conception of how people organise themselves. Culture is of course more of an anthropological concept of what people do and how they conceive of themselves in groups. They may not be in opposition just because Arnold Toynbee sets up a rather interesting binary distinction. 

However, the reason why I have been thinking about this extensively is because I want to understand the how and why and wherefore a group of people might become Trump supporters and have wildly inaccurate information about the world swimming in their brains and perhaps even commit to the kind of drastic action that sees them storming Capitol Hill. It's not good enough to just say those people are conspiracy theorists or nut jobs or they're all personality disordered (although once suspects this to be the case). On some level, these self-proclaimed patriots convinced themselves that Trump was right, the election was being stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats, and if only Mike Pence would listen to Trump and declare Donald Trump the winner, they would get the outcome they wanted.  

Ordinary people find all of this bizarre, laughable and more than a little disturbing. And yet, there we had it; a kind of American version of the Beer Hall Putsch had taken place and managed invade the Capitol. It was a stupid attempt at a coup, but it was an attempt all the same. The alarming part of it was that it was done by professed patriots who also took with them Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia. It's hard to fathom how they get around their own cognitive dissonance, but they sure made a fist of storming the Capitol. 

It begs the question how? How can the building belonging to the legislative body of one of the most advanced civilisations be overrun by people seemingly devoid of logic or reasoning, but fuelled on confect rage? 

The clue is in their defiance. 

Fools On The Hill

I mean it only takes second to think about it - if somebody else was anything other than white-male-and-heterosexual, what exactly is the problem for America? If they had the same rights as one enjoys in America, how is that a problem? How is that even a cause? Blatant injustices where people perish at the hands of an overzealous police - that's an issue. Somebody feeling upset their candidate lost an election? How is that even remotely a cause enough to march on the Capital and storm Capitol Hill? 

Why would they get so hot under the collar? 

If you listen to what the Trump supporters had to say, it was that they were trying to defy history. From their point of view, a Joe Biden victory had to be the product of voter fraud, and that winning back America meant defying the stated election outcome. Nevermind that the election was undertaken with a good deal of scrutiny and fairness and technology to boot. Those are the hallmarks of Civilisation, but these Trump supporters were proponents of Culture. 

Their list of their grievances extended to feminism, political correctness, immigration and immigrants, the fear of having their guns taken away, secularism and the slighting of fervent Christian beliefs, separation of Church and State, abortion, welfare, and having to wear a mask during a pandemic. They believed the QAnon conspiracy theory which held that Donald Trump was fighting a 'deep state' run by a cabal of paedophiles which included prominent democrats scubas the Clintons. It was all a heady mix of internet bullshit and rumour and innuendo. Yet defiantly, they were patriots, ready to break the law to save the United States America. These were nominally Republican supporters. Lincoln wept. Teddy Roosevelt spun in his grave. Heck, even George W Bush thought it wasn't okay. 

Capital Exchange

If this were a minority that was minuscule, then there might be a way to manage it. The fact that there are 70 million voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 suggests a lot of people are walking around with this defiant mindset about just about everything that is demonised by progressive politics. Yet their defiance is there to push back at the tide of enlightenment and progress. If things progress, these people feel like they would give up too much in exchange for that progress. If your are on the side of capital, the enlightenment seems bold and beautiful. If you are not, then you feel threatened. And so the rhetoric of these Trump supporters always swings towards a sense of victimhood, even though there is no real sign that they are anything close to being a victim of any sort. 

As the QAnon fervour dies down in the wake of the inauguration, it seems rather odd that it was even a thing. There are a lot of losers in the economic stakes in middle America. It's not surprising that they would find hope in strange places such as a conspiracy theory. If the reality of stagnant real wages dating back to 1980 was something that needed addressing, they perhaps should have been reading 'Das Capital' and 'The Communist Manifesto' for a proper historic understanding of their true plight as lumpenproletariat. Instead their own defiance lends them to imagining other forms of identities which on the whole are entirely misplaced. The embrace of Neo-Nazism - which is no different to embrace of Nazism together with the symbols of the Confederacy strongly indicates xenophobia seems to have been the motivation.

Is Republicanism really going to continue being hand in glove with these kinds of odious ideologies? We asked that back in 2015-2016 and the logical answer seemed to be no; and yet through the very desire for defiance has meant that the Republicans would rather embrace this losing side of the argument than redraw their own positioning. Each time it probably got argued that their base was a particular kind of identity which would not abide a shift from rank racism, hypocritical piety, and a devout support for the regime that punishes the coloured through the police. Now that Trump has been chased off into the sunset and some sanity has returned, with QAnon being found to have been a figment fo some internet fantasy, maybe the Republicans can re-start a proper examination of how they came to be hostage to such toxic morons. They would be well advised that the defiant ones are the problem. The ones who mount a cultural defence of the indefensible, are the very ones that need expulsion. 

Culture, as Graeber pointed out, is not their friend either. 

I want to report one more thing from history. There was a politician called Kaishu Katsu who was instrumental in negotiating the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. You can imagine there was much heady argument and a battalion of die hards willing to die for the cause and take what became Tokyo with them in a sea of fire. Katsu noted in his memoirs "it is impassioned patriots who bring about the downfall of a country". 

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance - Part 1

A Little Something About Culture

In the time I wasn't blogging, I spent a lot of time just surfing YouTube. One of the things I came across was David Graeber giving a short talk about what 'culture' actually is, and how culture might not be your friend, so to speak. Graeber's talk hones in fast on saying culture is defiance. He gives some anthropological anecdotes that delineate the notion that culture comes from the desire to differentiate one's own group from another set of people, with a good deal of defiance. 

Up to that moment I saw the video, I was operating under an older consideration which I got from Arnold Toynbee whereby Toynbee said habits, memes, methods and objects that allow themselves to be transported across peoples is the essence of civilisation. Things that do not lend themselves to be transported across peoples, is culture. That's pretty abstract, but the example I like giving is this: you can experience sushi anywhere because serving  raw fish on rice with vinegar is something that has traveled all over the globe. If you live in any Australian metropolitan area, there is some place that serves up sushi. If you're not Japanese, this is perfectly fine - the food being served is sushi, well enough. 

However, if you are Japanese, then this food being served is far from the proper cultural practice of what sushi is, and how it should be served. A proper cultural experience of sushi is if you had it served to you by a Japanese chef in Tsukiji, Tokyo, right near where the fish markets used to be. It will cost you a  pretty penny, around a thousand dollars for two people - and you have to settle the account in cash. In other words, it has to have the right time, place, people, materials, and atmosphere. The entire practice cannot be transported, and so we can see sushi properly served, is a deeply cultural practice. And Japanese people will tell you with defiance, you can't take that experience out to some shopping centre in say, Chatswood, NSW, Australia and call it proper sushi. What you get in Chatswood is some blonde girl working her summer job, serving up sushi made by a machine in plastic containers! (gasp, horror) It's sushi, Jim, but not as the cultured Japanese know it. As experiences go it ain't bad, but the connoisseur of culture says it's an ersatz experience, tainted by the wrong place, people and ingredients. 

And that, in a nutshell is Graeber's point. If you look around the globe, all kinds of people are doing things in the name of culture, and most of the time, it's in defiance of the other. "That's not real tequila", "That's not real salami", "That's not how you sew a quilt" and so on and on it goes. Quite often, 'the other' being defied is the Hegemony of Western civilisation which brings technology, the flattening of social hierarchies, reification of values, and porn. The people who bang on the most about their culture or some sovereignty derived from culture are the people who stand to lose the most social power within their society should the process of civilisation further erode their social status within those societies. 

So in short, Toynbee says Civilisation is what goes around the world and Culture is what stays put. Graeber says Culture stays put because it's an act of defiance. Graeber says a lot more in the video but for today's point, that's the salient bit. 

What's Wrong With Civilisation Then?

Now, here's the bad news. There is plenty wrong with civilisation as we experience it today. The process of civilisation is such that it destroys entire eco-systems in order to exist. There is something manic about the power of civilisation to travel the globe and deliver things on demand, disregarding its costs. 

Yet when I rhetorically ask, "what's wrong with civilisation?" I'm not going to talk about those sorts of issues.  I want to talk more about the reaction of people who encounter it, without having invited it. 

Civilisation historically arrived with colonisers. This is not limited to the European expansion into the world starting with Columbus, but also Rome into Gaul, Germania and Britain. That process is the entire point of 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. Everywhere people went with better technology enabled them to outcompete the local population for survival. We may even look at colonialism and the spread of technological civilisation as effectively interchangeable. But it brings about carnage. 

This plays out in a funny way in a place like Australia. On the one hand you have white settlement in Australia backed up by the tremendous technological gap between the British settlers and the indigenous people leading to the defiance we see with indigenous people denouncing Australia Day. Yet you have certain parts of the old White Australian community wanting to join Pauline Hanson's defiance against Asians (in the 90s) and Muslims (this side of 9/11). Australia's ratbag knee-jerk crypto-fascist-right are defying the predominant progressivism, citing a largely imaginary 'Australian culture' which is somehow sacrosanct. It's only sacrosanct because without it, their identity might go up in a puff of smoke. 

Civilisation is a process that chips away at your current state of being. Civilisation makes you ponder things about the future where culture would ask you to ponder the past and history. Civilisation asks you to consider changing your ways whereas culture asks you to preserve the old ways. To stand with civilisation, in a sense is inherent to the global process where local cultures get swallowed up by the tidal wave of capitalism - the process whereby the woodland park gets turned into a carpark, or a lookout over a landscape gets a tourist centre and a kiosk that sells tourists a variety of generic food you would never wish to critique. As civilisation washes out culture from our lives, gone are discernment, and aesthetic judgments. Civilisation isn't all good for everybody - it can't be all good for everybody - exactly because it is tied into global capitalism as it was once tied in implicitly with colonialism.  

What's Right With Civilisation Then?

That said, it is worth considering what good civilisation is in terms of what it brings about. When you look at progressive causes, a lot of them are to do with equality. Equality is about fairness a lot of the time. Whether that is emancipation of women or recognition of LGBTQ rights, it has a decidedly civilising edge to the simple fact that we make accommodations for fairness. The angry right that snarls at the mere thought of political correctness and censoring freedom of speech and hating on science, to any kind of critical revision of history, basically strikes a pose of defiance agains these simple moves towards progress. 

This kind of defiance as cultural credo is at times gently persuasive but more recently we have entered a time when the extreme rhetoric of both sides has obscured the middle ground, right under the incessant footwork of the culture wars. Thus it is quite fitting that David Graeber argued 'Culture' is not your friend. The defiance inherent to cultural positions keeps us from improving a civilised, technological society. 

If we can all evolve our consciousness just a little bit, and leave behind notions created in feudal times or the dark ages, maybe we can bring about a true egalitarian utopia without killing the planet or killing lots of people. That's the promise of civilisation. Of course, whether we can actualise it is another story. 

All the same I'm writing all this down because I want people to consider who they are and what they hold to with defiance and why. Perhaps they are not as important as a better future. Maybe we all have to realise Culture is not our friend, and find a way forwards with civilisation. 

End of An Era For Stupid?

As The Time of Trump Draws Near The End

When it gets right down to it, I'm a sore loser. It didn't seem to matter no matter how much I offered up my opinions and pontificating over here. It was just howling into the wind. The world was stupid enough to be persuaded by the Murdoch papers and TV to vote Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump into power, solely to give tax cuts for the rich and hold off doing anything about Global Warming, what is the damn point of writing a word more about any of this? Have we not crashed into the Twilight of Civilisation? 

Not only did progressives not win, they could not stave off the onslaught of Stupid that ensued those losses. The English speaking world led by the USA, UK and Australia collectively lost its common sense and went with the worst kind of idiotic rhetoric as substitute for substantive policy. How is one to discuss what ensued those losses with any kind of sense?

So I stopped writing here. Why expend the energy? I can't beat Rupert Murdoch and his mighty minions of mendacity. Besides which, was it really my job to care? After all I have no kids. There is no generation I have to worry about. My friends with kids worry about the future, sure. I have had the odd luxury of not having to worry about that. In one sense, the stupidity that transpired because of those losses affected me less than it did my friends and their families. 

Yet it has been a terrible. 7 years of Liberal Party rule in Australia, 6 years of Brexit politics in the UK, and 5 years of Donald Trump politics has put a huge dent in the credibility of the English speaking world. Nations that would look to the democratic leadership of Washington DC and London got an eyeful of miserable, partisan, anti-intellectual, pseudo-scientific brouhaha that passed for politics in these three countries - all of which share the intoxicating poison of stupidity that is the Murdoch press. 

And so in the days following the Putsch upon Capitol Hill by pro-Trump idiots, we are left in the odd position of waiting to see if this horrible period in history will come to a close, at least in America. Will the Republicans finally wake up in the Senate as to just how untenable Trumpism has been for the GOP? Or will they aid and abet the worst President of all time, one last time? Brexit finally limped over the line in late December so as bad as the outcome is, that little drama has come to the end of its run. All that is left is living with the consequences. As for Australia, there is a good deal of time left before the next election. I don't know if the ALP will ever gets act together in time to oust Scomo and his squad of awful human beings. Also offers me little confidence. It appears that Bill Shorten's loss in 2019 was a spectacularly bad election to lose for the ALP, let alone Australia - but that is all a rant for another day.

If anything, the 2010s were a disappointing decade. It didn't really even have any form. People just scrapped for a living thanks to the GFC, and then it was done.  

The Dying of People

In the intervening years I did not write here, I found some of my friends began dropping like flies. Death is always somewhat surprising, even though you come to realise that you have walked into the age group where death is not so surprising. Plenty of people have died at ages younger than what I am today. I feel a far cry from the person that started blogging back in 2003. And people really do die. I'm deeply saddened by the passing of Geoff Murphy, Brian Burgess, and Michael Jacob. They're all of a certain generation, and they all passed away during the years I did not write here. 

I lost a friend to liver cancer; and I've lost one to COVID-19. If you spend your 30 year adult life drinking a lot, dying of liver cancer is unsurprising. If you are a touring musician in the USA, and Donald Trump is your president, then it is unsurprising that you contract COVID-19 and die. Some famous people have died form COVID-19. Countless animals perished in the mega fires of 2019. Death is all around us. death brought about by stupidity of others, is surprisingly common. 

Death is a thing, in case you were lulled into not thinking about it as a factor in one's decision making. 

Ambivalence Grows

The other thing I want to report from my self-imposed exile from writing on this blog, is that I've become even more ambivalent about how I feel about many things. One becomes less certain as one piles the age on to one's being. One becomes more discerning, but one also becomes less decisive. 

It's also a little disturbing when you read back stuff written by people who died at an age younger than you are right now. This is one of those things that happen. You get perspective on your own life and existence in a  way that you just can't buy into the framework of thought and ideology that is invested in a book. I used to think Soseki Natsume was a giant of literature. He died at age 49 and suddenly when you re-read his work as somebody older, you get this weird cognitive dissonance that maybe you really could rhetorically beat up on the literary giant if he only were around today - hey, I even have a cat these days Mr Natsume! 

Same with Jack Kerouac who died at 47. F Scott Fitzgerald at 44. Jane Austen, 41. Raymond Radiguet, 20. Or the notion that for all his entire, massive, output, everything Frank Zappa ever did was as a person younger than you are today. Ditto Glenn Gould who died at 50. It's all a little unsettling - and this adds to this ambivalence. Everything looks like it has 10 sides to the argument, and it's exhausting.  

So What Are You Gonna Do, Art Neuro?

I'm going to pop in more often this year. Stay tuned. 

Screams of Burning Koalas

 Can't Express Fully How Angry I Still Am

Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire. 

Mallacoota on New Years Eve sounded like Hell had landed and started dancing on everybody's heads. 

People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year. 

So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet? 

Come join the fun!

Gladys The Koala Killer

Amongst Other Terrible Things She Does

Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully. 

And yet her policies make you want to turn to eco-terrorism. She would countenance the building of these terrible tollways, and chopping down native forests, or putting a coal mine in the middle of a water catchment. Above all, she would name a policy that seems friendly towards the preservation of Koalas but is in fact incentivises for more environmental destruction, not less. It's crazy stuff. And somehow the voting public does not bat a mascara-ed eyelash. We keep going with this insane party in charge, with Gladys at the helm. 

Because of all that, she has earned the moniker, Gladys the Koala Killer. Is it fair? More than plenty! We live in terrible times. She is contributing her part to that terror. 

Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.  

Come join the fun!